Isaac Butler

the worst examples he can find, and sometimes maybe making up some examples.

And he's, you know, Xeroxing them and mimeographing them and putting them in an envelope.

And they promised people that if they didn't fight back against this, literally one of the letters says, physical persecution of Christians won't be far behind.

You know, there's some debate about this because I think we have this assumption that all press is good press.

And once you're the subject of a controversy, it's good for your career.

Everyone I talked to.

with the exception of Andre Serrano, disputed this.

Andre Serrano is absolutely like Jesse Helms gave me my career.

I wrote him a thank you letter in 2000 about it, right?

He's very open about that.

But if you read the memoirs by the four performance artists who came to be known as the NEA for, they were like, my artistic homes couldn't book me because it was too dangerous.

They had to hire extra security.

I got death threats, you know, no one could see my work for what it was.

They were just looking for the controversial thing.

There's a lot of pain around that.

There's a lot of fighting back against shame, against, you know, trying to find pride in your work again.

And just, it's exhausting to be under siege like that all the time and trying to create your art.

So for the individual artists who were swept up in this, it was very, very difficult.

David Wojnarowicz was dying.

of AIDS for much of the time that he was dealing with this.